Many People Who Want To Be Writers

Things Are Going To Go Wrong, And I Think We Are False To Life If We Don’t Portray It. But There Is Also The Hope That Some Lucky Clown Is Going To Come Along And Stumble Into The Gold Mine. And I Think You Are Also Entitled To Hold Out That Hope.

I Am Always Interested In Why Young People Become Writers, And From Talking With Many I Have Concluded That Most Do Not Want To Be Writers Working Eight And Ten Hours A Day And Accomplishing Little; They Want To Have Been Writers, Garnering The Rewards Of Having Completed A Best-seller. They Aspire To The Rewards Of Writing But Not To The Travail.

I Was Surprised When Shortly After New Year's Day Of 1983, The Governor Of Texas Summoned Me To His Office, Because I Hadn't Been Aware That He Knew I Was In Town.

I Had Been Educated With Free Scholarships. I Went To Nine Different Universities, Always At Public Expense, And When You Have That Experience, You Are Almost Obligated To Give It Back. It's As Simple As That.

I Would Suppose I Learned How To Write When I Was Very Young Indeed. When I Read A Child's Book About The Trojan War And Decided That The Greeks Were Really A Bunch Of Frauds With Their Tricky Horses And The Terrible Things They Did, Stealing One Another's Wives, And So On, So At That Very Early Age, I Re-wrote The Ending Of The Iliad So That The Trojans Won. And Boy, Achilles And Ajax Got What They Wanted, Believe Me. And Thereafter, At Frequent Intervals, I Would Write Something. It Was Really Quite Extraordinary. Never Of Very High Merit, But The Daringness Of It Was.